The Fourth Drawing Is the Whole Thing

January twenty-seventh. I finished it Tuesday evening and then I just sat there. The sketchbook open on the table, the drawing done, and nothing particular to do next. I wasn't reading it. I wasn't deciding anything. I was just sitting with the fact that it existed.

The drawing is the windowsill. Five objects, slightly shifted apart from each other, they moved when the collapsed bowl came down from the sill to the shelf above the stove in September, and I left the gap open on purpose, and apparently I needed to draw it. What I didn't understand until I was sitting there looking at the finished page was that this is the fourth drawing, which means the sketchbook is now a record. Not an art project, not a habit. A record. The first drawing was the collapsed bowl, Thanksgiving 2011. The second was the honey jar from the farmers market, August 2012. The third was the bowl revisited, or maybe the letterpress card, September 2012. And then nothing for five and a half years, and then Tuesday evening, the gap on the windowsill. I bought that sketchbook at the pharmacy. I had no plan for it.

caught in the act of being done

Simone came by at some point while I was still sitting there and found me like that, which I imagine looked a particular way from the doorway. She took the photograph before I noticed her, and when I turned around she had already gotten what she came for. We looked at the drawing together for a minute. She said, 'that's the whole apartment,' and I said I know. The sketchbook is going back on the counter now. It'll probably sit there for another few years, which is fine. I know what it is now. I didn't know that before Tuesday.